


The Lucky One

by eudaimonic



Series: The Art of Being Happy [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Flower AU, M/M, Pastel Dan and Punk Phil, Warnings at the start of every chapter, background kickthestickz if u squint, cross-posted from Wattpad, dan gives flowers to sad people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 20:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 4,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13220748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimonic/pseuds/eudaimonic
Summary: Sadness can be cured with something as small as a flower, but only sometimes.The AU in which Dan hands out flowers to people and his punk boyfriend Phil likes to draw everyone who gets one.





	1. You Could Devastate Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Hurricane by Halsey.
> 
> No warnings apply.

Dan was carrying a daisy that day - one of those over large ones that you find in bouquets or on the side of a motorway at 2pm when you know you should be in school but you're too high to even care.

The daisy looked pretty against the pastel blue of Dan's jumper, and it matched the white collar poking out from underneath the light material. It has been a warm day - nearing the end of the school year - but Dan's sleeves were down to his wrists and, unlike every other sane person, Dan refused to wear sunglasses.

"They don't suit my face!" He'd told me one time, I hadn't agreed. Dan suited everything.

"Who's the Daisy going to today then?" I had asked, because I ask every day.

"I'm not sure yet." Dan replied, his slim fingers skimming the edges of the Daisy's clear white petals - a breeze of a touch, as if he's scared the petals would fall off if he applied too much pressure.

He loves me, he loves me not.

Dan hitched his backpack higher on his shoulders, tucking the daisy safely into the eyelet on his shirt collar and reached over to take one of my hands between his own.

"You've been biting them again." He mumbled, nimble fingers tracing the dead skin around my nails as delicately as they had the flower petals. I said nothing, and Dan had twisted our fingers together, like he always did, letting our entwined hands drop between our bodies as we walked to school together like we had every day since year six when we'd stopped getting lifts off Dan's mum and decided we were old enough to walk to school.

It was a thing for Dan to bring flowers to school - and it was a thing for me to keep a lookout for said flower all day to see who he would give it to.

That day was no exception, I'd watched all day for that little Daisy; as soon as I'd noticed it missing from the eyelet on his shirt collar at lunch after I'd had media studies and he'd had business studies. I never asked who he gave them to because it seemed personal - like it was something that should be kept between Dan and that person, whoever they were.

I spotted the daisy later, on the way out at the very end of the school day, poking out of the canvas backpack of a girl with wildly curly hair and a wide mouth - she wore the exact type of glasses Dan wanted me to get and I would never have even considered in a million years and she had that spring in her step that only came with being given one of Dan's flowers.

I drew her lazily in my sketchbook on the bus back home, opposite a close up drawing of the daisy I had drawn in art because the teacher didn't care so long as it looked like I was being productive and I actually had something to hand in by the end of the year.


	2. All The Ways You Make My Stomach Turn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from It's Not A Side Effect of The Cocaine, I'm Thinking It Must Me Love by Fall Out Boy.
> 
> No warnings apply.

Dan had never known I drew all of them - the people with the flowers I mean. At least, all of the ones I managed to find.

Sometimes one would fall through the cracks; pictures of pretty pretty flowers with blank faces on the opposite page.

One time, back on the first day of highschool when my hair was still a gingery brown colour and Basshunter was cool, Dan had handed the flower to me on the way to school, and instead of a drawing of a poppy there was a perfect flower press and my own self portrait with all of my shitty wannabe emo hair and silver or black ear piercings contrasting against the delicate and dull dry petals crudely taped to the thick yellowy paper so they wouldn't fall out and be lost forever.

The day after the daisy, Dan had brought a periwinkle chicory flower to school and carried it around almost all day in the pocket of his faux denim shirt underneath his cream coloured cardigan. He wore a flower crown of fabric roses in his hair - left curly because he'd woken up too late to straighten it - and his hand barely left mine all day bar the lessons we didn't share.

At break he'd barely said a word to either me or Chris or Pj, his eyes roving over the students.

It was at the very end of lunch - one lesson left to go - when he apparently found his flower recipient.

We had been walking to psychology - the only class we had had together in sixth form - when he'd stopped, his hand pulling me backwards as he stopped in front of a younger boy with a stripe of electric blue in his hair. The boy's eyes widened in surprise, which was stupid because everyone knew Dan as the flower boy, and taken the flower from Dan's outstretched hand with a 'thank you' that sounded more amazed than nothing.

Then we'd continued walking, I made a mental note of what the boy looked like for the bus ride back, and after psychology - when Dan went off to his after school drama club with Pj - I drew the boy with the bright blue streak in his hair and his amazed eyes and gaping mouth next to a drawing of the periwinkle chicory flower - dated it, and wandered what the next day's flower would be.


	3. You Coincide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Are You Calling? by Flagship.
> 
> No warnings apply.

We were never boyfriends - or we were, we just never talked about it. When people asked we'd say no but when people said we didn't argue.

It never mattered to us.

Nothing ever meant anything if you didn't give it a meaning - and we never needed to. Never wanted to.

We confused the heck out of people is what I'm saying. One day we'd push each other around like brothers and the next we'd kiss each others' foreheads like an old couple. Dan was especially fond of forehead kisses, and I was taller than him and it eventually became natural for us to stand close together, his head angled down and mind angled up so my lips were pressed against his forehead and his nose was against my chin. His hands would wrap around the straps of my backpack or press flat against my chest and we'd just stand; listening to the sounds of the other breathe.

I don't remember what made me so sad the next day, I guess it was just one of those days where the world feels like it's collapsing all around you and the air feels thinner and music sounds boring and your stomach twists in that way where you don't feel sick but you feel wrong - like there's a tether from you to your bed and the further away you get the tighter it pulls until you're a ball of anxiety with a rock in your throat and a hook straining in your stomach begging you to just give up and go back to bed.

Dan noticed of course - and instead of a greeting he pulled the tiny yellow butter cup out from the eyelet of his navy shirt collar and tucked it neatly into one of the safety pins on my denim jacket. He pulled the white sleeves of his jumper over his hands and smiled.

"Cheer up buttercup." He had said, and that's all it had taken for my stomach to unclench and the world to right itself.

His lips had been soft when I'd kissed him, standing at the bottom of our street - me in my Doc Martens and black denim jeans and blue denim jacket, him in his clean blue jeans and stupid white jumper that was somehow never dirty. That was the least pastel he had been in a while, but before he'd given it to me, the yellow buttercup had stood out from the other end of the street.

"That was terrible." I whispered against his lips, referring to the cheesy pun that had brought a sly grin to his lips before I'd kissed it away.

"It was great." He replied.

For the first time since our first day of high school, my own face stared back at me from my book on the bus back home.


	4. And Here You Are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from the English translation of Glósóli by Sigur Rós
> 
> No warnings apply.

Thursday, the flower is a pink chrysanthemum Dan had picked from his front garden. His mother didn't mind Dan picking her flowers, nobody seemed to mind Dan picking flowers.

Dan's reputation was wide, not only the school knowing him as the flower boy, but the whole town seemed to know who Dan was. Not that he wasn't easily recognisable - what with his pastel jumpers and innocent face despite his height which towered over most people. I was the only one taller than he was back then, I wonder if he'd have grown to be taller than me eventually.

People would look on at him and the flower poking out of his pocket or eyelet and their eyes would do this weird thing where they widened and seemed to get brighter simply because  _he was there_. This happened whenever we would go out on the weekends to get coffee in the town or to relax in the Green with my stoner friends that Dan didn't really like, but he'd come anyway and just talk to me or Chris or Pj if they came too.

Because Dan was special. He never got bullied, he was too nice for that; everyone seemed to want to be the recipient of one of his flowers - even the most masculine of boys seemed to perk up when they noticed Dan hadn't given his flower away yet - but nobody ever realised that that was the wrong thing to do.

Because Dan didn't give his flowers to just anyone, he gave them to those who looked like they needed it. The girl with the faint mascara stains on her cheeks coming out of the girl's bathroom, the man sitting alone in the coffee shop not even noticing as Dan drops the flower on his table on their way out.

The pink chrysanthemum on Thursday is given to my English teacher, a jolt of surprise going through me when I walked into her classroom to see it lying across her desk. Dan must have given it to her when they split up to go to art and drama respectively.

"He bumped into me in the corridor." She had said when she noticed me staring at it when I was supposed to be reading chapter 18 of The Kite Runner. "Said, 'it matches your shirt' and then walked off down the corridor like it was nothing."

I had laughed, because it was such a Dan thing to do and it really did match her shirt that day.

"You have a special one there, Phil."

I never corrected her, never told her that I don't 'have' him because you can't own a person - especially not a person like Dan. Instead I pulled out my leather bound sketchbook and spent the rest of the lesson drawing her thin pointed face and wondering how she'd gotten the barely discernible dark circles under her eyes - covered in a cracking layer of concealer that is just slightly too dark - and thinking about how Dan had noticed all of this with just once glance.

_You have a special one there, Phil._


	5. And You Don't Need Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Recover by CHVRCHES.
> 
> No warnings.

On Friday the 15th of May, the flower poking out of Dan's pale yellow shirt was a lavender; he wore one of my old faded denim jackets he'd stolen before Christmas one day when it was extra cold - it clashed horribly with his blue jeans.

"Denim on denim?" I'd commented.

He'd looked down as if surveying himself, and there was a piece of his hair at the back he'd forgotten to straighten, then he'd looked up with a thin smile on his face and said. "I'm starting a trend."

I'd snorted, taken his hand and walked us down the street.

"That will never be a trend."

Our feet crunched on the gravelly pavement as we walked, my battered black doc martens and his mucky white canvas flat form shoes that would look ridiculous on anyone except Dan.

"I can pull it off." Dan had said, spinning so he was walking in front of me and backwards, both of our hands clasped out between us. "I mean look at me."

And I had, I always had.

I had grinned, pulled him closer by our joined hands and kissed his forehead.

"You're an idiot." I'd told him, the words slurring against his skin.

"Take it back!" He had gasped, brown eyes golden in the bright morning.

Dan didn't have drama after school on Fridays, and that particular Friday, when we met at the gates outside of school, he still had the lavender in his pocket and there was a frown between his eyes that looked unnatural on his face.

So, instead of getting the bus, we'd walked home - and on the way he handed the lavender to an elderly lady pulling along one of those trolley bag things. She'd grinned and exclaimed "oh!" in a voice all old ladies seemed to have.

"Why did you give it to her?" I had dared to ask.

Dan had turned to me. "Nobody at school needed it today - and she looked like she did."

That was when I realised I loved him.

It was stupid, and I had probably always been in love with Dan because everybody was in love with Dan but this was different - it felt like the birds in the trees sang especially for Dan and the sun seemed brighter in his presence. Dan wasn't golden, or even silver or copper, he didn't shine in the sun or conduct electricity like all of those novels say.

When we kissed it wasn't electric.

Because Dan was a flower; he was bright and carefree and delicate and beautiful.

Dan was soft and smelled like love and looked like a Monet painting with all his pastels and flowers and easy smiles.

He was everything.


	6. I Give You This Smile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from When the Day Met the Night by Panic! At the Disco

Dan stopped answering his phone on Saturday, and by Monday it was clear he wouldn't be in school.

The day felt empty without him, without the mystery of where I'd find the flower that day - without his hand as we walked to school and without his stupid pastel jumpers and the whispers behind our backs about how we were a weird pair.

Because when Dan wasn't in school everything was pointless. Nobody smiled. There were no "oh wow thank you's!" that meant anything or no "because they needed it." and shy smiles.

When Dan wasn't there nobody seemed to smile.

It was at lunch when a person I had never met before in my life came up to me to ask if he was okay. I hadn't known what to say so I said 'yes' and continued on my way, wandering if I'd just met one of the few who had slipped between the cracks or if they'd never received a flower but felt close enough to Dan to ask anyway.

And then I thought about how I'd said yes and wondered if I was wrong because Dan hadn't talked to me all weekend.

Chris and Pj said nothing.

I had never asked why Dan gave flowers to strangers - I had wandered but I had never asked. Before then I'd never felt the need to know but that day I needed to know. I needed it like I needed Dan to come back to school with one of his flowers and goofy grins and dumb hobbit hair.

The leather bound book in my bag stayed closed that day.


	7. You Know I Got You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from Is there Somebody Who Can Watch You? by The 1975
> 
> Warnings:  
> very light mention of drug use that means absolutely nothing

****

On Tuesday Dan was wearing his favourite lavender jumper over a white shirt, a yellow lily clutched loosely in between his fingers as he leaned up against the wall at the end of the street. His hair was curly again, and his shirt tails poked out underneath the jumper but I didn't say anything.

I took his hand and kissed his forehead and continued  _not saying anything_ for the rest of the day.

Not at break when he sat silently twirling the lily between his fingers.

Not at lunch when he didn't eat or even look for someone to give the lily to.

And not even when it was time to go home and instead of going to his drama club he latched onto my hand and said "let's go."

The lily still clutched between his fingers.

When we got to the bottom of our street - Dan's house across  and up by one, my house straight up by six - I spun him around, placed both my hands on his cheeks and said, "are you alright?"

And he had nodded, kissed my nose and stepped back - which was so unlike Dan that it sent a jolt from my brain through my bones and into my heart where it stung and sat like a thorn.

"Why didn't you give your flower away?"

Dan wet his lips.

"Because I needed it."

That night, when I was too high to think straight and Dan didn't know I'd gone out and the stars were out and bright and the sounds of the motorway were dull despite it being only a few meters away, I drew Dan in my book surrounded by lilies that were only slightly weird because of the weed and the vodka which I shouldn't have taken together.

Painting Dan's eyes looked just as desperate as real Dan's eyes had when he said the words "I needed it." and I needed to forget that.

_I needed it._   
_I needed it._   
**_I needed it._ **


	8. Oh, You Are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title taken from You by Keaton Henson

Wednesday's were boring. They still are. But that Wednesday was not.

Dan brought many flowers that day - a whole bouquet of assorted flowers that got smaller and smaller as the day passed and he handed them out. I didn't ask why - I never asked why - but something about it seemed weird, it was out of character.

It broke the pattern he'd built up over the years and it was confusing and messy.

But Dan laughed and grinned and girls squealed when he approached and even the 'cool guys' stopped what they were doing and smiled when Dan handed one of them a perfect flower.

Dinner ladies had white daisies poking out of their apron pockets, teachers had roses in their jacket eyelets and girls had stuck them in their hair using bobby pins - shrieking when bees tried to land on them at break and lunch or during free periods they decided to study outside.

Chris had jokingly copied them, borrowing a bobby pin from a girl called Emma and fake screeching that there was a bee even when there wasn't.

Many faces joined my sketchbook that day, all of them laughing or screaming or blushing. When I got home, I gently placed the filled sketchbook on top of the pile of mismatched sketchbooks I'd used over the years to draw Dan's flower people - hundreds of portraits of every person who had ever received a flower.

I remember thinking that he must have given one to every person in school by that point, I remember wandering if he'd kept track - made sure every person gets at least one flower.

I'd stuffed a new one in my bag, because I had always had spare sketchbooks around, and fell asleep with pencil streaks on my face and hands.


	9. You Know I'd Put You First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title taken form Two Weeks by FKA Twigs
> 
> warnings:  
> major character death by suicide

When Dan didn't bring any flowers on Thursday I became worried. The air that day was dogged with an eerie sort of confusion and trepidation. Everybody wanted to know why the flower boy was flower less - but not even I knew.

While we walked to school he talked too much about everything that didn't matter to him.

In class he drew flowers on his hands and up his arms until he ran out of space and decided to use mine instead. I had let him - following my unspoken rule of never asking questions - and allowed him to draw on my arm in sharpies, beautiful multicoloured flowers twisting their way up to my elbows on vines that connected them all together around to the base of my wrist.

I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask so badly I was afraid to even say a word lest the question tumble out from between my traitorous lips; the wrong syllables formed by my tongue - carried away in its confusion and wonder.

If Dan had sensed my curiosity - he didn't elaborate. We walked around that day hand in hand with matching flower tattoos inked onto our arms.

But sharpie will never be permanent - and by the next day it was faded down to a barely there ghost of the vibrancy they used to be - a memory now only remembered in the form of pencil on paper in a brand new sketchbook wishing to be filled with the vibrancy of a hundred flowers and faces.

But the sketchbook would never be filled.

Because that day - where the flowers had faded and Dan hadn't been there to walk with me to school in the morning - saw the end to all happiness.

I remember how it was sitting in the head teacher's office next to Chris and Pj - the flower in the vase on the desk, still bright, but fading around the edges; the leaves wilted and deflating.

Her voice was thick with genuine sorrow when she told us the news. That Dan was never coming back to school, never handing out another flower to a person who 'needed' it, never going to be there ever again. Because while our world turned on, Dan's had stopped in the form of a silver blade and broken wrists on a bathroom floor.

When I got home that day, a single red rose lay on the doormat and I cried so hard the red smudged and ran down the page as I drew.

Dan had died.


	10. I Don't Understand Why You always Have To Be Gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title taken from Where'd You go? by Fort Minor
> 
> warnings for references to suicide

The assembly for Dan was the worst thing I ever had to go through. The teachers could barely get the words out for crying and when the message spread across the hall there was barely anything else. The whole school united once again for Daniel Howell - this time in his memory.

The idea for a memorial came from someone I didn't know - a girl with straight blonde hair and green eyes who approached me one day the next week.

Flowers were planted all around the school grounds, people carried flowers around on their person and everyone - including the teachers - were present at his funeral.

The day after the funeral was a Monday - and on that Monday the arts department gathered together to hold a ceremony in his honour.

By Thursday the school had given permission for one of the walls facing the sports field to be painted in his honour and - lead by Pj - a giant portrait of Dan was painted on the wall. His beautiful face immortalised in bright colours and decorative flowers; surrounded by words from every student in the school.

"We miss you."

"Thank you for the flowers."

A week later, Pj found me at lunch time next to the mural. Not looking at it, but leaning against it like I had taken to doing.

"I don't think I can do another year of school without him Peej." I had said, because there was nothing else to say.

"It will be different"

"It'll be dull - everything will be dull without him there to brighten things up with his stupid pastel jumpers and dumb flowers."

"You should write something." He had replied, handing me a matte black sharpie pen. "Before it gets glazed over."

"I don't know what to write." I had shaken my head, thrusting the sharpie back into his hands but he had backed away then, shaking his head and shoving his hands into his pockets.

"Something you need to." He had said, almost as cryptic as Dan had been.

And then he had disappeared back inside and I had been left to stare at the many words scribed around Dan's smiling face. Around the multi-coloured flowers bordering the portrait and giving a brightness to the wall that would never again be present in the halls.

I realised then that there was only one thing I could write on that wall that wasn't already written a thousand times over.

I knew the next year was going to be torture without him - and it was. Until it wasn't anymore, until the flowers grew every summer and I realised that I could pick my own, and it seemed as if the world realised that with me as people began to find their own happiness. People began to pick their own flowers.

"I love you" I had written, because it was the truth, and now, protected under a layer of glaze so that it could forever be read and remembered, it still is the truth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you or anyone you know is suffering from depression or thoughts of suicide, please dont suffer alone. you're loved more than you may know.


End file.
